Mapping Our Hearts: A Virtual Poetry Reading, co-hosted by Birchbark Books and the University of Arizona Press
On Wednesday, April 29th, 1:30 p.m. PACIFIC TIME, the University of Arizona Press is partnering with Birchbark Books for a stellar National Poetry Month event featuring three poets from the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks series. Come hear poets Molly McGlennen, Casandra López, and Laura Da’ read from their latest poetry collections and discuss their work.
Please register for this free online event here on eventbrite.
We love our independent booksellers like Birchbark. Please consider ordering our poets’ books from them. Use this link.
The Sun Tracks series is an award-winning literary series that features the works of Indigenous and Native artists and writers.
This event will be hosted on Zoom. You’ll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30 pm Pacific Time on 4/27/2020. Please email publicity@uapress.arizona.edu if you have any questions.
About the authors
Molly McGlennen is an associate professor of English at Vassar College. She is the author Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits and Creative Alliances: The Transnational Designs of Indigenous Women’s Poetry. McGlennen’s writing has appeared in Sentence, As/Us, Yellow Medicine Review, and Studies in American Indian Literatures. McGlennen received her PhD in Native American studies from the University of California, Davis, in 2005, and her MFA in creative writing and English from Mills College in 1998.
Her first book with the University of Arizona Press, Our Bearings, is a collection of narrative poetry that examines and celebrates Anishinaabe life in modern Minneapolis. Crafted around the four elements—earth, air, water, and fire— the poems are a beautifully layered discourse between landscapes, stories, and the people who inhabit them.
Casandra López is a CantoMundo Fellow and founding editor of the literary journal, As/Us: A Space for Women of the World. López, who teaches at Northwest Indian College, is Chicana, Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Tongva, raised in Southern California.
Her book with the University of Arizona Press, Brother Bullet, speaks to both a personal and collective loss, as López confronts her relationships with violence, grief, guilt, and ultimately, endurance. Revisiting the memory and lasting consequences of her brother’s murder, López traces the course of the bullet—its trajectory, impact, wreckage—in lyrical narrative poems that are haunting and raw with emotion, yet tender and alive in revelations of light.
Laura Da’, a poet and public school teacher, is a lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Eastern Shawnee. Da’ is the recipient of an American Book Award, a Made at Hugo House fellowship and a Jack Straw fellowship. She lives near Seattle with her husband and son.
Da’ has two books published with the University of Arizona Press, Instruments of True Measure, and Tributaries. Her newest book, Instruments of True Measure, charts the coordinates and intersections of land, history, and culture. Lyrical passages map the parallel lives of ancestral figures and connect dispossessions of the past to lived experiences of the present. Shawnee history informs the collection, and Da’’s fascination with uncovering and recovering brings the reader deeper into the narrative of Shawnee homeland.
The University of Arizona Press
